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All you should know about Flutter development

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Re: All you should know about Flutter development

#71

Post by ohgodplsno »

udbhavs wrote: post #20
samwillis wrote: post #10

I think developers often want to find a “one true cross platform toolkit for all cases” and I don’t believe that will ever exist. It depends so much on both your app/market but also the skills and experience within your team. No 1 priority is move quickly. Flutter is brilliant, and probably the way to go, for some apps. A great example of a successful Flutter app is the Sonos app, relatively simple and responsive ui…

I've been wondering why webviews with native page transitions aren't a more commonly used thing. It improves the UX a lot by dealing with the abrupt navigation changes of regular web apps. There was a plugin for Cordova that did this ( https://github.com/Telerik-Verified-Plugins/NativePageTransi... ) but it's abandoned.

Because the UX of having a non-native app is, and will always be dogshit.

Re: All you should know about Flutter development

#72

Post by toastal »

netcyrax wrote: post #24
slig wrote: post #17

Is there any Flutter-like alternative but using TypeScript? Dart feels too weird.

Give Dart a chance :) Felt the same way, turns out it's quite fun.

I'll give it a chance when it has algebraic data types and pattern matching. The fact that they post these as examples of language features they don't want means I don't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I look at Option, Either, and functor in dartz and I can see that the ergonomics are so bad and noisy to read. Semicolons required in a modern language is the cherry atop this ‘nope’ dessert.

Re: All you should know about Flutter development

#73

Post by jamil7 »

samwillis wrote: post #10

I think developers often want to find a “one true cross platform toolkit for all cases” and I don’t believe that will ever exist. It depends so much on both your app/market but also the skills and experience within your team. No 1 priority is move quickly. Flutter is brilliant, and probably the way to go, for some apps. A great example of a successful Flutter app is the Sonos app, relatively simple and responsive ui…

> If you are building a social media app, either Native or React Native (or a combination) is probably the best way to go. You are aiming high so need the best performance and ux.

I'd also add that from a business perspective if your product heavily depends on or is entirely mobile-based then it often makes sense to go native and remove an extra party, you don't want to be stuck waiting for upstream fixes or features to land months after they've been released.

Re: All you should know about Flutter development

#74

Post by fdjm »

danielvaughn wrote: post #50

I love the idea of Flutter, as I think it's a more stable approach than what React Native tries to do. But I hate Material Design with a passion, and I'm not sure why they tied it so closely to Flutter. Even the functional packages you import into your Flutter project are labeled "material".

If you look at the architecture diagram, material is one of two supplied, but optional widget libraries (you can replace with your own, but obviously that's a lot of work): https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/architectural-overview#ar...

Re: All you should know about Flutter development

#75

Post by jamil7 »

sirius87 wrote: post #66
samwillis wrote: post #10

I think developers often want to find a “one true cross platform toolkit for all cases” and I don’t believe that will ever exist. It depends so much on both your app/market but also the skills and experience within your team. No 1 priority is move quickly. Flutter is brilliant, and probably the way to go, for some apps. A great example of a successful Flutter app is the Sonos app, relatively simple and responsive ui…

For mobile, if you ask me, the only sane cross-platform strategy is what Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile [1] intends to do: portable business logic, and leave the UI aspects to each platform, keeping them native. Both Android and iOS have been making strides in simplifying DX for composing expressive UIs. It only makes sense to use those new Android Studio/XCode features as they come. [1] https://kotlinlang.org/lp/mobile…

I've been waiting for the right opportunity to use it and for it to mature a little more. I really wish we could go the other way since we have a bunch of existing Swift packages and our team is much stronger on iOS than Android.

Re: All you should know about Flutter development

#76

Post by jillesvangurp »

Superblazer wrote: post #31
Comevius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart is like Java, Kotlin or Swift with the runtime model of JavaScript, there is nothing weird about it. It takes an hour to learn it if you know either of these.

Dart reaches nowhere near kotlin. Kotlin is a beautiful language.

Yes, the reason Dart exists and continues to exist is not that it is better than Kotlin but because Kotlin is not owned by Google and they just have a giant not invented here syndrome. It's all about control for them. It's basically their way or the highway.

But Google seems to be betting on multiple horses here. They also created Jetpack Compose. And of course Jetbrains extended that to Compose Desktop and Compose Web so that ecosystem is actually becoming quite interesting together with their multi platform Kotlin compilers. Compose Desktop does not currently use the Kotlin native compiler unfortunately but it does use Skia, which is the same graphics library that Google uses for Chrome and Flutter. If they'd fix the desktop variant to use the native compiler, they'd be able to target basically any platform. Including IOS.

IMHO that is such an obvious thing to do for Jetbrains that I pretty much assume that they are planning to go there. That would make this a direct competitor to Flutter.

Compose is getting quite popular despite still being relatively new. IMHO, if Jetbrains (or Google) get their act together and make that usable for IOS, there would be a lot of developers that would use that. I know I would. Flutter is not for me. I'm sure it's great but I have no desire to learn Dart.

We are currently using Kotlin js to be able to target mobile and web and kotlin jvm on our servers. We package up our app using Cordova and we have integrated a few plugins to e.g. do things with NFC. It works great. Performance is not an issue for us. And having just one code base and 1 UI team is critical for us. But I wouldn't mind some more options for cross platform development. Browsers are a necessary evil currently to target mobile and desktop with 1 application. But the boundaries between these platforms are increasingly artificial.

Re: All you should know about Flutter development

#79

Post by pzo »

mhoad wrote: post #9
sdflhasjd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always been dart that put me off. For flutter apps supposedly compiling to native code, I don't like using a language that was apparently designed to live within the constraints as a web-based language. There are many other languages that I would rather use instead.

I suspect that mid term this is going to be changing. There is currently a big behind the scenes push to move the web target to Wasm (dependent upon Wasm GC landing in some kind of reasonable timeframe). At that point I suspect you will see the importance of compiling to JS declining rapidly. Side note: The other major push that seems relevant to some of the other comments here is they are also looking to redo the sh…

I think they are planning to use wasm as target for Web. They don’t have any reason to compile to wasm on mobile when they already can compile to native. WASM is equivalent of JVM and I doubt they will start providing binding to different languages. Even if they do Dart would be the still main language on this platform in similar vein like Java/kotlin is the main language on JVM - JPython, JRuby, Groovy are irrelevant. I also don’t think JavaScript/Typescript will get irrelevant in WASM - for the same reason even though you currently can compile CPython to wasm

Re: All you should know about Flutter development

#80

Post by mhoad »

scarface74 wrote: post #51

Knowing the history of Google when it comes to abandoning projects, why would I tie my horse to any Google cross platform framework?

I think a simple heuristic would be who is using it internally.

It’s their payment platforms and Ads platform and a centrepiece of their upcoming operating system. It has literally billions of dollars depending on it. It’s not going anywhere.

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